• 0 Posts
  • 231 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle

  • It also makes no sense with the bandwidth you’re given.

    For example, if you have a 1 Gb/s connection, that’s 0.125 GB/second, which comes out to about 320 TB/month if you fully use that bandwidth. Giving you a pipe that can download 320 TB but then limiting it to, say, 1 TB/month makes no goddamned sense whatsoever. You’re giving people a sports car and telling them they can’t drive over 15 mph.








  • I would disagree. Bluesky has no algorithm and it’s growing quite rapidly. And I think that a large part of that is just having the people there that one might want to follow, and fosters community and conversation. A place like Threads absolutely does not do that. Mastodon is just an impenetrable mess from a UX perspective. The average user doesn’t care about federation and needs a solid and understandable entry point. Bluesky is federated but 90% of the people there have no idea what that means.

    but trying to sidestep it completely like Mastodon is is just going to result in a network that never hits the critical mass necessary to start exponential growth

    If keeping algo-gaming engagement bait off the platform is a price a platform has to pay, then I’m happily willing to accept that.


  • Its the absolute lack of algorithm

    “It’s the absolute lack of a way to game the system with engagement bait and reward rage-posting”

    Fixed that for you.

    It’s not a matter for average users, it’s a matter for the people who farm engagement and post 300 times per day. Having a space that isn’t dominated by accounts like that is a good thing. It’s why Threads is such a miserable place. The algo there is aggressive and heavily rewards this kind of shit. Accounts like that provide no value and create toxic spaces full of rage and misinformation just to keep the waters churning and keep a constant flow of vapid “content”. It’s gross, and we are so much the better if we lose a ton of them.



  • It seems ostensibly like it would be as easy as having an understanding enough of e.g. distilling, so that if you try to distill your own spirits, you know to discard the head and tail to avoid methanol poisoning. But this is so much more complex than that.

    I think what it feels like is something akin to being trans and not having access to HRT, so you get hormones on the black market vs. trying to synthesize the hormones yourself from raw materials. I would support the former (though with a lot of research and making sure you’re getting reputable supplies), but think the former incredibly fraught for a layperson.

    I think the real answer isn’t DIY pharmaceuticals, but rather universal healthcare, informed consent, and a medical system (both physicians and pharmaceutical manufacturers) that puts patient care above any kind of profit motive


  • All the people here saying “well of course because they weren’t trained on AAVE”:

    THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT

    It’s the same reason facial recognition and voice recognition software have a difficult time with anyone who isn’t white or a speaker of perfect, uninflected standard english. The bias is created by the developers, conscious or not, because they only train it on what’s in their own bubble. If you don’t have diverse teams behind the development and training, you will create this bias, whether you want to or not. This is well known.






  • You seem to not understand the scale at which these things operate. We’re not talking about niche tools that only incels and creeps will use to jerk off to CP, we’re talking about tools that can be used to manipulate, spread mis- and disinformation, and imitate actual people doing things they wouldn’t normally do, and can do so at a scale that is exponentially greater than anything we’ve ever seen.

    Go take a look at Facebook. Log out of YouTube and look at the front page. Try to do a Google search. Look at the absolute flood of AI generated shit. I know a lot of authors of short fiction, and the publications that they submit to that normally see a couple hundred to a couple thousands of submission per month have been flooded with hundreds of thousands of submissions per month, all AI garbage.

    Now imagine it becomes so good that it’s indistinguishable from the real. Pics, vids, articles. The scale and speed at which people can create society-level harm and destroy lives is incomprehensible. This is not a “think of the children” thing. This is an inflection point where you will never know if the video you just saw of a political candidate calling for the extermination of X group is real or not. But the harms and consequences will be real. You will see revenge porn not just of nudes, but of videos of people seemingly doing horrific acts, and having their lives ruined because of it. And it will happen so fast and in such a flood that nothing will be able to stop it or counter it, because no one will see the truth buried in the inundation.

    Again, we could do some of this now, but not at the unimaginable scale or speed that AI generation allows for.

    This is not a good thing. And if this is the world you want, then there is no reasoning with you. You are truly lost.



  • This right here.

    I’m so fucking sick of the “it’s just a tool” or “sO YoU wANna BAn EvErYthiNG?!” bullshit. It’s all bad faith garbage that people hide behind because they want the results of these “tools.” They want the AI porn fakes of teenagers and celebrities (because they’re pathetic creeps and incels with no concept of dignity or consent). They want to be able to rip off actual artists so they can pretend like they’ve done something “creative” so they can get social media clout. They’re completely unserious people who can’t be reasoned with. They need to be shunned and shamed.